Virtual Encounters:
Community or Collaboration on the Internet?
[first published in Leonardo, Volume 30, No 5, 1997 as part of the 5th Annual New York Digital Salon]

The space of computer-mediated communications known as the internet is an inhabitable, utilitarian, and largely unregulated terrain of global scope. It overlays and re-territorialises existing nation states and their borders. It has come to signify an intimate relationship between the local and the global that heralds the dispersal of established cultural institutions and the proliferation of diversity. It provides a space in which new relations are both necessary and formative of new social networks. The notable traits of this space include the paucity of social context for information, the few widely shared norms governing it use and the absence of regulating features and social anonymity [1]. For its users, this networked social system or virtual community is, as cybertheorist Sandy Stone put it, "first and foremost a community of belief" [2]. Here I will examine some of the ideas about and practice of this new, virtual community.

Social historian, Raymond Williams warns that the term "community" itself is problematic: "One is never certain exactly to which formation the notion if referring. It is when I suddenly realised that no one ever used 'community' in a hostile sense that I saw how dangerous it was" [3]. Certainly, the traditional notion of community is founded on assumptions about consensus, rationality and collectivity that do not translate well to virtual spaces like the internet. In a virtual environment, collaboration displaces community, teasing out, as it seems to do, the possibility of radical encounters with the 'other'. Informed by a postmodern sense of irony, fragmentation and multiciplicity, collaboration undermines normative and unitary social formations in today's virtual environments.

The adoption of cyberspace as a distinct social space of interactivity renders it indistinguishable as either public or private space. it is represented as the seamless extension of the private and public into each other or as the interstices between the public and private into which a range of identities can be projected. As Stone argues, "the distinction between inside and outside has been erased and along with it, the possibility of privacy" [4]. In this way, the internet acts as a terrain in which the public/private distinction is deconstructed and in which those who engage in online social interactions are not necessarily inscribed according to this set of oppositions. In questioning the legitimacy of the public/private distinction in internet-based social groups, the use-value of other relational dichotomies is also open for interrogation: individual/community, subject/object, self/other. Of course, such binarisms are not readily discarded given their prominence in cultural and historical discourses and practices. However, in denying the functions of binary oppositions, their limits are displaced. Those who socialise online do so within both the public and private realms simultaneously, making such categories impossible to sustain. In creating disorder through the dissolution of public/private distinctions, the internet, as a frame for a multitude of encounters, represents a departure from the political rationality in which, according the philosopher Michel Foucault, the "integration of the individuals in a community or totality results from a constant correlation between an increasing individualisation and the reinforcement of this totality" [5]. That is, networks represent an alternative political technology for individuals to exercise power or escape domination by the political rationality of the state and its institutions.

According to writer Elizabeth Reid, internet users constitute a social network who "share common language, a shared web of virtual and textual significances that are substitutes for, and yet distinct from, the shared networks of meaning in the wider community" [6]. This is in keeping with William's observation that community is contingent on communication whereby "the process of communication is in fact the process of community: the sharing of common meanings, and thence common activities and purposes; the offering, reception and comparison of new meaning, leading to the tensions and achievements of growth and change" [7]. Such notions of commonality are constitutive of consensual and rational organisation. While "community" describes a nebulous social form, it nevertheless alludes to an entity that is whole and often geographically contingent - homogenous - complying with ideas about metanarratives, rootedness and permanence that deny and falsify difference. Computer networks impinge on that order by providing an alternative field in which to perform connection and interactivity, to activate difference and fragmentation and to attenuate rootedness to a place.

Simultaneously, this shift does not necessarily disavow embodiment or location. Psychologist Sherry Turkle evokes the text-based virtual gaming sites known as MUDs [8] as a cyberperformance of community that implies "difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity and fragmentations. Such an experience of identity contradicts the Latin root of the word, idem, meaning 'the same'" [9]. Similarly, it contradicts notions of community insofar as they rely on commonality and sameness. For author, Howard Rheingold, permeability between the online and off-line is essential for the word "community" to be applied to virtual social worlds [10]. This contingency raises the question of whether community can be formed via virtual networks - whether it is a valuable means of describing and knowing virtual social experience - when it must be made to work via the intersection of online and off-line experience.

The Promise of Regeneration

Increasingly, economic, social, cultural and personal experience is being performed through these virtual networks, tied as they are to movements of international capital and militarism and shaping much of what is external to them. The result of the resituation of both the human and the machine whereby the human becomes "more situated within the technology and the machine becomes part of the human world, [while] boundaries to humanity's inscriptions and meanings become blurred" [11]. It is perhaps in this context that the more duplicitous imputations of collaboration come into their own as collaboration not only with other but also with technology: to collaborate implies an element not only of co-operation but also of deceit - to somehow not be yourself, as in the historical representation of collaboration during wartime. Embedded within this notion is the idea of 'being' true', to oneself or to one's country, and involves the belief in the idea that such manifestations of identity are whole and fixed.

Of course, not all internet-based collaboration is inherently deceitful - even though there is an element of uncertainty - rather, it permits the performance of more fluid and mutable identities. As such, these identities are direct responses to the moment, emergent from the encounter rather than framed by the mores, prohibitions and inscriptions of off-line society and subjectivity. With the absence of cues such as sound and sight in a social encounter, the information that net users can obtain about other net users is only what is disclosed: no one knows who you are. Turkle points out that "virtual communities ranging from MUDs to computer bulletin boards allow people to generate experiences, relationships, identities and living spaces that arise only through interaction with technology" [12]. Feminist and science historian, Donna Haraway claims that "to 'press enter' is not a fatal error, but an inescapable possibility for changing maps of the world, for building new collectives" [13]. The premise that cyberspace (and the relations therein) remains negotiable, providing alternative potentialities for the appearance of intimacy and partiality, is central to Haraway's exposition of cyborg politics. These politics are a direct consequence of the collaboration of human and machine. In this context, the partial subject is understood as the fragmented or split subject, as hyphenated rather than as a while or fixed 'being'. Haraway's cyborg acts as a disavowal of origin stories, constantly producing its own legitimacy to build less limited realities. As such, the cyborg operates via interface, connectivity and multiplicity to actively subvert traditional ideas about identity that rely on the notion of authenticity and, therefore, fixity.

According to Haraway, all technologies are regenerative and reproductive. Being on the internet is akin to being located in the "the womb of the pregnant monster ... to produce a patterned vision of how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible but all-too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible other present" [14]. Despite it masculine and militaristic origins, the matrix of computer communications is unconfinable and ungovernable: it is the post-apocalyptic, artificial mother who promises the regeneration of those failed by Hobbe's artificial man, the Leviathan. The implication is that whatever social networks and identities emerge on the internet, they are constitutively different from their precedents, from those external to it.

One conceptual framework for the collaborative and generative possibilities of the internet is provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of rhizomatics:

The rhizome connects any point with any other point, and none of its features necessarily refers to features of the same kind. It puts into play very different regimes of signs and even states of non-signs ... It is not made of units but of dimensions, or rather of shifting directions. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle, through which it pushes and overflows ... Unlike a structure defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relation between these points and bi-univocal relations between those positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentation and stratification as dimensions, but also lines of flight or of deterritorialisation as the maximal dimension according to which, by following it, the multiplicity changes its nature and metamorphoses ... The rhizome is an anti-genealogy. It is short term memory or an anti-memory ... In a rhizome what is at stake is the relationship with sexuality, but also with the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, the natural and the artificial ... all kinds of "becomings'. [15]

The rhizome forms the line between points and therefore forms both the connection and the flight, the in-betweenness of collaboration by which 'one' is always divisible. Collaborations are multiplied - as diverse as cybersex, MUDs and chat - operating in an ever-expanding field of connectivity and rendered not only active but interactive. Collaboration is process-oriented, disordered, never a beginning nor an end. Encounters are inherently collaborative. The encounter is generative, heralding the possibility of any number of 'becomings'. Encounters are sites of transit and the encounter itself is transitory. According to Turkle, the internet is the site of reconstructed relationships whereby community and identity can be perceived as "cultural work in progress" rather than as a given [16]. As performed in cyberspace, encounters are measured as moments - the ethics of which are not always apparent - in which subject positions are not fixed. For Haraway, "politics rests on the possibility of a shared world. Flat out. Politics rests on the possibility of being accountable to each other in some non-voluntaristic 'I feel like it today' way [17].

Beyond Consensus

Locating this type of accountability as community is problematic for it evokes the binarist antagonism or individual versus community in which the [male] individual with attributed rights is privileged over the [female] community, inscribed with an ethic of care. According to feminist and philosopher Iris Marion Young, "individualism and community have a common logic underlying their polarity, which makes it possible for them to define each other negatively. Each entails a denial of difference and desire to bring multiplicity and heterogeneity into unity, although in opposing ways" [18]. The notion and practice of collaboration impinges on that privileged sense of order operating between the individual and the community. Collaboration, in this context, implies identities that the viral, liminal, hybrid, syncretic and potentially destabilising. The encounter implicit in collaboration represents the site for re-inscribed cultural and identity politics in which, as Turkle describes, "we have learned to take things at interface value. We are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real ... We join virtual communities that exist among people communicating on computer networks as well as communities in which we are physically present."[19].

Collaboration, representing both the connection and the flight, provides the context for more detailed consideration of virtual social networks as a viable means of attending to desire, diversity and difference without subscribing to the legitimising force of consensus. Postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard note his wariness of the practice of consensus, calling for "an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus" [20]. Consensus denies difference and partiality, imposing it own hegemony. The social encounters resulting from this shift are inherently different from the utopian "ideal of community [which] entails promoting a model of face-to-face relations at best" [21]. In the fragmented space provided by the internet, consensus is impossible and irrelevant. So framed, collaboration attends to multiplicity and partiality without subscribing to or aspiring to consensus as a manifestation of commonality and an articulation of the unitary. As an act of collaboration, social encounters can subscribe to and "develop a self-conscious politics of partiality ... which does not absorb difference with a pre-given and predefined space but leaves room for ambivalence and ambiguity" [22].

Young proposes that a politics of difference be developed to replace "community as the normative ideal of political emancipation ... A model of the unoppressive city offers an understanding of social relations without domination in which persons live together in relations of mediation among strangers with whom they are not in community" [23]. It is advocated here that computer networks provide a utilitarian space for establishing this model and appraising the means by which a semblance of collaboration may be achieved therein: to encounter and exchange with the stranger is to collaborate in interactivity ad connection to achieve unknown and unspecified results. Cultural critic Elisabeth Probyn identified Foucault's technologies of the self as a means of investing the process of community with care for difference and as an operational question for community:

Central to the technologies of the self is an attention to the passion of knowledge, a passion which does not reify knowing but rather entails a probability that one occasionally will lose oneself, only to find it in another place, caught up with other knowledge and people, in the reflection of another angle and perspective [24].

My proposition is that the internet can operate as 'another place' in which one can lose oneself and that being caught up with others involves a collaborative encounter rather than consensual one. For Probyn, the point is to put difference

to work not as adjectives to 'oppression' but rather as constituting an image-repertoire of conjunctural selves to be spoken ... The self is not an end in itself; rather is it the opening of a perspective, one which allows us to conceive of transforming our selves and our communities ... It is to make the sound of our identities count as we work to construct communities of caring, to technologize and transform ourselves in the care of others [25].

Such commitment to the ongoing theorising of the self operates as a political position from which to activate the technologies of social and personal formation in which difference has value and by which unitary formulations of community are destabilised. Such an equation relates to the proposition that social relations as performed online are akin to those of the unoppressive city which Young describes as "places where strangers are thrown together" [26]. In this setting, "politics must be conceived of as a relationship of strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance" [27].

The conditions of computer-mediated communication indicate that these politics are integral to the formation of virtual social networks. From Reid's observation that "users' acceptance of IRC's [Internet Relay Chat] potential for the deconstruction of social boundaries is limited by their reliance on the construction of communities" [28], it can be surmised that certain aspects of "making out identities count" have taken a secondary position to the formation of an idealised and possibly normative virtual community. This is why other practices of social interaction, such as encounter and collaboration, which destabilise the process of unitary community and identity, need to be made operational. For philosopher Alphonso Lingus, western societies have deferred to a practice of the rational community that conceals and excludes:

Beneath the rational community, its common discourse of which each lucid mind is but the representative and its enterprises in which the efforts and passions of each are absorbed and depersonalised, is another community, the community that demands that the one who has his own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose himself to the one with who he had nothing in common, the stranger [29].

The Community of Strangers

The notion of a 'community of strangers' has increasing currency through its inherent contradiction. Given that many cultural and social indicators remain invisible and available primarily by disclosure in a virtual context, "one enters into conversation in order to become an other for the other" [30]. Accordingly, internet interactives involve a large number of self-representations via "the creation of replacements and substitutes for physical cues and the construction of social hierarchies and positions of authority" [31]. These processes of representation can operate to compensate for some perceived lack, such as desire for the other, or, as previously stated, to build less limited realities. In the confluence of representation and reality in virtual environments, simulation takes on greater significance in reflecting desire and identity by hypertextual strategies that are inherently collaborative. According to Turkle, "in computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid and constituted with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis" [32]. Technology becomes facilitative in the deconstruction of normative categories of interaction. The displacement of such constrictive conventions permits internet users to generate their own modes of relating, modes that define them as a network of strangers, produced and reproduced as and by collaboration.

In cyberspace, anonymity renders everyone who enters a stranger and also strangers to each other. For psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva, radical strangeness is built into human psyches and place-bound identities. In cyberspace, and in-between space, the borders of oneself are both threatened and drawn, blurring one's identity, making currency of the decentred self. As writer Noelle McAfee put its in discussing Kristeva's work, "even though the experience is profoundly unsettling, it produces an awareness of one's being there" [33]. In the intermediary space of the internet, one only has awareness of oneself and all others are strangers. McAfee states, "the foreigner presents an opportunity and not an abyss. By being shaken loose from the 'they', this self sees the radical strangeness of others as the continual possibility for being a subject, a split subject whose mirror is always partial. Without completion, possibility thrives." [34]. This is not to say that an engagement with computer-mediated communications is abject but rather intersects with the abject experience. It is in these encounters with strangers, outside the realm of the nation-state or the rational community, that Kristeva suggest an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable. Such an assertion correlates with Haraway's formulation of cyborg politics in which the politics of encounter are neither naturalised not absolute, but in a constant state of flux, open to negotiation, sociability, perversion and regeneration.

Clearly, the traditional unitary construct of community cannot be simply transposed into a virtual environment. Computer-mediated interactions are collaborations based on processes of interactivity, connectivity and encounter; they are ephemeral performances of multiplied and shifting identities. They involve a practice of complexity that repudiates binarist production of identity and that generates an awareness of "not knowing". Virtual environments provide for encounters with the stranger who, in most off-line contexts would be seen as an interloper requiring assimilation rather than as an opportunity for perverting unitary formations of the social and generating expanding fields of social interactivity and connectedness.

NOTES

1. Sara Kisler and other, quoted in Elizabeth Reid, "The Electronic Chat: Social Issues on Internet Relay Chat", Media Information Australia, No 67, (1993) p. 62
2. Donna Haraway, "The Promises of Regenerative Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others", in Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 325
3. David Watt, "Interrogating Community: Social Welfare Versus Cultural Democracy" in Vivienne Binns, ed, Community and The Arts (Sydney, Australian: Pluto press, 1991) p. 62
4. Allequére R. Stone, "With the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures", in Michael Benedekt, Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1992) p. 105
5. Michel Foucault, "The Political Technology of Individuals", in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton, eds, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London: Tavistock, 1988) pp. 161 -162
6. Reid, op.cit. p. 70
7. Watt, op.cit. p. 61
8. MUD stands for Multi-User Dimension or Multi-User Dungeon, the latter stemming from MUD's origins as an online version of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons
9. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995) p. 185
10. ibid., p. 246
11. Bernadette Flynn, "Woman/Machine Relationships: Investigating the Body Within Cyberculture", Media Information Australia, No 72 (1994) p. 12
12. Turkle, op.cit., p. 21
13. Haraway, op.cit., p.327
14. ibid., p. 295
15. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, On the Line (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983) pp. 47-49
16. Turkle, op.cit., p. 177
17. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway", in C. Penley and A. Ross, eds, Technoculture (Minneapolis, MA: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993) p. 11
18. Iris Marion Young, "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference", in Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 307
19. Turkle, op.cit., p 23
20. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children, D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate and M. Thomas, trans. (Sydney, Australia: Power Institute of Fine Art, 1992) p. 24
21. Young, op.cit., p. 302
22. Ien Ang, "I'm a Feminist but ...: 'Other' Women and Postnational Feminism", in Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle, eds, Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1995) p. 58
23. ibid., p. 302-303
24. Elisabeth Probyn, "Technologizing the Self: A Future Anterior for Cultural Studies", in Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 509
25. ibid.
26. Young, op.cit., p. 318
27. ibid.
28. Reid, op.cit., p68
29. Alphonso Lingus, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p.10
30. ibid., p. 88
31. Reid, op.cit., p. 70
32. Turkle, op.cit., p 15
33. Noelle McAfee, "Abject Strangers: Toward and Ethics of Respect", in Kelly Oliver, ed, Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing: A Collection of Essays (New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 121
34. ibid., p. 132